Alice YangYang
is a contributing
columnist for the Fort Bend Star.
She is astudent at Stephen F. Austin High School-FBISD.

This column expresses the personal opinions/views of the
writer. If you would like to express your opinions/views
regarding the column, write a SIGNED letter to the
editor. Name can be withheld by request with a valid day
time phone number.

Ramblings

I hate thinking about the Big Questions.

What is Life? Why are we here? How to
achieve Happiness?

Questions like these not only make my
brain want to explode but also led me into depression a
while ago.

Being agnostic, I have no religious
guidance. I donít know whatís out there. I canít say I ever
will. Being a teen at the cusp of adulthood, Iím terrified.
I donít know what I want to do. I donít know where I will
end up. I just donít know.

Life seems to me, purposeless. At best, a
concrete illusion of abstract ideas. At worst, a series of
unrelated events.

Examining life is like examining
yourself. The only way to see? Through a mirror with your
own eyes.

Reality is forever unreal.

And where do we go when weíre dead?
Sucked into the ruthless, silent vortex of space, infinity,
and mystery, never to think, feel, be.

Life is a compromise, a sacrifice of one
thing for another. Never the best of both worlds. Always a
choice.

And the other possibilities are never
lived, never known, diminished to dust as the fork in the
road fades and we walk on.

Whatís the purpose of thinking when all
it leads to are other unanswered questions?

I stopped searching for a purpose to
guide me.

My new philosophy is to walk the given
and chosen forks of life and just experience.

Everything doesnít happen for a reason.
They happen because they happen.

I stopped trying to capture and analyze
every little grain of sand that slipped through my fingers
and started to just let the sand flow and feel its
continuous texture.

And it was like a huge burden lifted off
of me, something so close to a religious catharsis that it
left me forever suspended on an invisible plateau.

And the world from then on was surreal,
the realest reality Iíve known. Through my depression,
nothing mattered. I was a zombie walking my daily routine
with the world whirling around me. But afterwards,
afterwards the only clarity I saw was how silly everything
was.

People living life with masks on, wasting
unwanted emotions. People living life without masks, never
finding acceptance. The types of people. The nature of
humans. The veil of understanding. The inherit pessimism.
The gilded optimism. The layers upon layers of experience
and deceit and influence that morph us into ever-morphing
beings. The beauty of ignorance. The fatality of knowledge.
The mystery. The paradox.

Life is.

Yang is a
contributing columnist for the Fort Bend Star.
She is a student in FBISD.